With Barack Obama’s sweeping move to reorder the nation’s immigration system through the stroke of the presidential pen, Democrats say the White House is making a dramatic and likely irreversible bet that the ultra-diverse Obama coalition will sustain the party through 2016 and beyond.

For months, the premier political question haunting Democrats — aside from Hillary Clinton’s yes-or-no decision on 2016 — has been whether Obama’s unprecedented support from young people, women and nonwhite voters will roll over into a new campaign, with a new candidate at the top of the ticket.

The president’s decision to use his executive powers to protect some 5 million undocumented immigrants from deportation is bound to draw a backlash from middle-of-the-road white voters. Republicans assailed Obama’s handling of immigration in the midterm elections, catering to a conservative and notably less diverse electorate with ads in states such as Arkansas and New Hampshire. Early polling shows significant suspicion of Obama’s unilateral action: An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found 48 percent of Americans pre-emptively opposed to the executive actions, versus 38 percent ready to endorse them.

As a political matter, then, the president’s wager is this: that the voters with the longest memories will be those in the rapidly growing, next-generation national electorate, heavily inflected by socially progressive young people and a growing Latino population.

For all the predictable blowback Democrats will face across the South and even in areas of the Rust Belt, strategists hope the party will be rewarded handsomely in states that have swung rapidly toward their party in national elections thanks to accelerating demographic change. That may be small consolation to red-state senators like North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp or West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, who may have to defend the policy when they run for reelection in a few years.

But Clinton, the most formidable Democratic figure on the political horizon, channeled the enthusiasm of most party leaders in a statement Thursday night endorsing Obama’s “decision to begin fixing our broken immigration system” — and blaming Republicans for the failure to pass comprehensive reform.

Other 2016-minded Democrats hasten to explain the electoral upside for their party: Think of states like Florida and Virginia, they say, places that once leaned conservative but have moved rapidly toward the center (and perhaps beyond) with the expansion of nonwhite communities in the Washington, D.C., suburbs and cities such as Tampa and Orlando. Or, for Senate Democrats, look to the two top states in which the party will play defense in 2016 — Nevada and Colorado — where the dominance of Las Vegas-based Clark County and the diversifying Denver suburbs hold the keys to reelection for Sens. Harry Reid and Michael Bennet.

Even more optimistic Democrats say: Consider states such as Georgia and Arizona, currently red states where the trend lines of population change are likely to let a strong Democratic presidential candidate not named Obama compete in 2016. The party would need strong, motivating issues to bring out often-discouraged minority voters; for Hispanic-Americans, immigration certainly qualifies.

Steve Schale, the Democratic strategist who twice led Obama’s campaigns in Florida, said he doubts the party would face meaningful, long-term backlash from white voters over the immigration decision — at least, not from white voters the party would have any chance of winning over in the first place. The constituencies most directly affected by Obama’s orders, Schale said, won’t suffer from the same amnesia.

“It’s a move that will be welcomed by Hispanics in Florida in the same way that Hispanics in Florida were disappointed by the decision to put it off during the [2014] election,” Schale predicted, noting: “The decision to delay immigration reform certainly didn’t appear to help us with certain elements of white voters during 2014.”

Mo Elleithee, the Democratic National Committee’s communications director, vowed that the GOP would pay a price for its heated attacks on the White House’s policy: “The rhetoric coming out will come back to haunt them. We are capturing every bit and will make them answer for it. They are not just alienating, they are offending, the [Hispanic] community.”

Republicans believe that Obama is inviting deep punishment with his actions this week. Not only does the GOP sense genuine anger among voters about the ongoing mess on the border, but party leaders say Obama’s orders will look like pure arrogance, the brazen actions of a discredited president.

Though the GOP has struggled to assemble a viable, diverse coalition in national elections, the party is on a hot streak in large, traditionally Democratic states across the Midwest — big, blue-collar battlegrounds like Ohio, Wisconsin and Michigan, where a certain segment of Democratic-leaning, populist white voters may recoil from what they perceive as overreach on the border.

And even Democrats who are enthusiastic about the implications of a national showdown on immigration in a presidential year recognize that the issue has plainly dangerous consequences in off-year races, particularly House and Senate races fought outside of urban America and the Latino-inflected Sun Belt.

Other senior Democratic strategists involved in the immigration fight expressed skepticism that restive independent voters would cling to their concerns over the executive actions. If they currently show resistance to the scope and aggressiveness of Obama’s orders, the Democrat said, that’s likely to fade over time as the issue fades from talk radio and the Fox News chyron.

And in any case, the composition of the national electorate continues to change to the benefit of a party that’s lenient on immigration, legal or otherwise. The presidential vote has grown steadily less white and steadily more Hispanic over the past two decades. In 1992, 87 percent of presidential voters were white, while 2 percent were Hispanic. Twenty years later, white voters represented 72 percent of the electorate, while 10 percent were Hispanic (13 percent were black and 3 percent Asian).

So while a national election polarized around border issues might once have spelled doom for Democrats, the party believes the basic lines of national politics have changed to the point where something like the opposite is true.

William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who has studied what he calls a “cultural generation gap” on diversity and immigration, said Obama’s orders represented a decisive wager on the newly emerging electorate.

“They think they will probably take some hits, but that longer-term, their base is the future,” Frey said. “That’s probably the calculation they are making with this.”

Democratic pollster Geoff Garin went a few steps further, declaring that by 2016 the debate will have returned to a place where his party can go on offense. Republicans have already lurched right this year on immigration, voting to end Obama’s policy of suspending deportations for undocumented minors. Digging in against the substance of this week’s orders, Garin said, will ultimately put Republicans on the wrong side of a debate about whether the government should deport millions of Latinos from the country.

“The polling is very clear that even among voters who have reservations about executive power, there is support for the underlying policy,” said Garin, an adviser to the 2012 Obama super PAC Priorities USA. “One of the impacts of the president’s action is that Republicans will have moved from a policy of self-deportation, in Mitt Romney’s terms from 2012, to a policy of actual deportation. That’s the fundamental meaning of their opposition to what Obama is doing.”

There’s precedent for eruptions of border-hawk ire followed by energetic mobilization among Latino voters and progressive allies. Polls throughout the 2010 midterm election showed strong support for enforcement crackdowns like the one Arizona pioneered that year, with a law allowing law enforcement officers to check the citizenship status of persons they detain. It was taken by some as a warning sign for Democrats intent on pursuing comprehensive reform.

But two years later, public polling in swing states such as Ohio and Florida showed voters supportive of an apparently contradictory Obama decision to defer deportations for undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors. That executive action was credited with helping re-energize the president’s campaign and driving a spike in Latino turnout. Nevada legislator Lucy Flores, who just lost a race for lieutenant governor, said the absence of a motivator like that — indeed, Obama’s explicit decision to postpone his executive actions — hurt Hispanic turnout this year.

“I wish this wasn’t a partisan thing, but it is,” she said, forecasting that this week’s announcement would help reelect Harry Reid in 2016. “It’s very apparent that Democrats have been leading the way on this issue … Republicans are not doing anything.”

Ben Monterroso, executive director of the advocacy group Mi Familia Vota, put it in starker terms than that.

“People will see Obama did it and fear Republicans could undo it,” Monterroso said. “It will be very clear in 2016 who is with us and who is against us.”